Twice Told Tales (1963)

﻿Review by Jeremy Heilman

﻿Perhaps, because of its reliance on three Hawthorne classics for inspiration, this Vincent Price vehicle manages to still feel quite solid today. A better than average sixties horror anthology, Twice-Told Tales manages to retain a great deal of the literate feel of Hawthorne’s work. Despite my having previously read all of the source material (the segments recreate “Dr. Heidigger’s Experiment”, “Rappiccini’s Daughter” and “The House of Seven Gables”), the film managed to entertain me on a level far from camp. To me, the most distinctive thing about Hawthorne’s gothic prose is his sheer puritanical shock at the horrors in his story. His stories almost always swerve into the supernatural...